WSJ: Our Murdoch Coverage Wasn't Good Enough

The Wall Street Journal did a lousy job of initially covering Rupert Murdoch's phone hacking scandal, admits the paper's special editorial committee. The paper was "slower than it should have been at the outset to pursue the phone-hacking scandal story" and failed to ask tough questions when it interviewed Rupert Murdoch for his side of the story, according to a report from the WSJ committee set up to oversee the editorial integrity of the paper after Murdoch bought it in 2007.

The paper is "doing much better now with aggressive coverage, fitting placement in the paper, and unflinching headlines," according to the committee, which stresses that it has found nothing to "even hint that the sort of misdeeds alleged in London have somehow crept in" to the Journal or the Dow Jones newswires. "A pattern of wrongdoing? A culture of journalistic malpractice? Shills for Rupert Murdoch or anybody else? That is not the newsroom we have observed over our four years," the committee writes. Click here to read about the seller's remorse that the family who owned the Journal is feeling. (More Dow Jones stories.)